I first became aware of Demand Media by reading this feature by Daniel Roth in the November 2009 issue of Wired [ Ed: ReadWriteWeb wrote a feature about it in August ] . In fact, Roth alerted me by email that his piece was about to come online, because he thought I would find it interesting. He was dead on. I found it fascinating, and also scary. Since then the discussion of these "content farms" (what ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus called them recently) has picked up a lot intensity online. For a good round-up, see Jason Fry's recent post The Furor Over Content Farms . In the following interview with Demand Media founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, I explore this new online phenomenon. Sponsor Jay Rosen teaches journalism at NYU and blogs at PressThink , which won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award. He is also the director of NewAssignment.Net and blogs at the Huffington Post. I've been discussing Demand Media a bit on Twitter, always referring to it as... (the demonic) Demand Media. This got the attention of someone from the company because I heard from Richard Rosenblatt, the founder and CEO, who said that I didn't understand the firm's mission. I asked him if he would do an interview with me to clarify what that mission was. He graciously agreed. Today I caught up with him by IM and we had the following exchange. Rosen : In the November 2009 Wired article by Daniel Roth, this was the part I thought most important: "Most media companies are trying hard to... boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it -- perhaps an impossible proposition -- the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value." Now, when you wrote to me, you said I didn't get the mission of Demand Media. As I understand it, the mission is to make a ton of money on the Web by using data mining to understand demand and then cutting costs in this way Roth described. Do I have it wrong? Rosenblatt : It's not all about cost cutting but about building a sustainable media model that allows us to achieve our mission to build an engine for what the world wants to know and share. We do this by connecting consumers with content that meets their specific interests and [offers] connections to people that share their passion. To do this well, and at scale, has required significant innovation and investment. Rosen : Here's what I think Demand Media has right. It's important to know what people are interested in. It's good to have tools that tell us what they wish to know. Using that knowledge to guide production is innovation, too, which we need-- precisely because production is so easy and cheap and the tools are so good. But here's what I think bothers a lot of people, and leads to a description of your firm as a "content farm" or "factory." I read about the 11 people - and 15 different roles - involved in the production of articles and video in Demand Studios. I get your idea that "quality is based on relevance." But if you're trying to match costs to the available revenue for a given piece of content, what happens when editorial quality requires costs greater that what's available in search revenue? And who's watching out for that point? Rosenblatt : I like the way you describe and characterize our business; maybe we have a lot more in common that you think. We are building content that is evergreen and solving a different type of problem. We are focused on creating content that solves problems, answers questions, saves money, saves time, makes you laugh - content that improves people's lives in big and small ways. It's relevant and impactful to millions and millions of people every day. It must generally fit within the economic framework the Internet provides today. As those economics change so will we. Rosen : Okay I got that but I am not sure it answers this part of my question: ...if you're trying to match costs to the available revenue for a given piece of content, what happens when editorial quality requires costs greater that what's available in search revenue? And who's watching out for that point? Rosenblatt : We only make content that we think can be done responsibly and within our cost structure. Rosen : As you know, there's a conversation going on out there about Demand Media, and I want to show you a bit of it. The premise, as Jeff Jarvis puts it, is that companies like yours (and Associated Content, to name another) "produce crap that's just good enough to fool algorithms," especially Google's. This is said to be a problem for Google. So Jarvis writes, "I think we may see search fall as the sole or even key means of discovery and filtering of quality content. I see three rings of discovery today: search (Google); algorithms (see: Google News, Daylife); and humans (see: Twitter). Note again that Bit.ly alone causes as many clicks a month -- one billion -- as Google News. Human power rises again. That's what Fred Wilson says today when he argues that social beats search, because "it's a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph." What do to you think of Wilson's idea, "social beats search" because it cannot be gamed as easily? If he's right, isn't that a threat to Demand Media's profits? Rosenblatt : First of all, we're not filling up search engines. We're creating content that lives on some of the most engaging websites in the world. These sites have really amazing tools that truly help people - whether it's managing your diabetes, motivating yourself to stop smoking, helping you drop your golf handicap, or determining what hike to take the kids on this weekend. And I wouldn't say we are even "search-led" any more. We are led by consumer demand. We are maniacally focused on giving users exactly what they want, where they want it. We have algorithms that tell us what search visitors want. And algorithms that tell us what YouTube visitors prefer. And we're working on new algorithms that tell us what social network users desire. And we're pretty sure the needs of mobile users will be different than all of the above - so we'll tune our approach for them too. Search is just where we started, because that's where most consumers started their information seeking experiences. But the world has changed a lot since we started Demand Media four years ago - and we're changing with it. Rosen : So you're getting social too and moving away from just search? Rosenblatt : Absolutely and have been planning this for years; we consider this a core part of our business and social has been at the center of our business since we started Rosen : Does the description of your company as a "content farm," content mill, factory (or even digital sweatshop) seem to you inaccurate or point missing in some way? I mean I know these are not nice terms or polite descriptions but are they wrong headed? Rosenblatt : Completely missing the point. We have significant editorial processes. Let me explain. How do we do this? We hire qualified professional writers, film-makers and copyeditors. Set clear editorial objectives and style guidelines for every piece. Require external sources with every submission. Copy edit what's been turned in. Fact-check it. Check it for plagiarism. Rate each piece so that writers get feedback. Provide education to improve the team members. Perform quality audits and take down content that doesn't meet current standards (thousands per month). Weed out content creators who aren't performing well or improving fast enough (we let go more than 100 creators per month). What's more like a sweatshop: someone's living room working their own hours or a typical newsroom? Rosen : When you're trying to build trust in an editorial brand, you pay those costs when they exceed available revenues, which I talked about. But it seems to me that Demand isn't trying to build trust in that way, it's trying to create content that meets demand, stays relevant and grabs the available search revenue. Why doesn't Demand Media create the bulk of its content under the Demand brand, like Reuters, say? Rosenblatt : We believe that the Internet continues to fragment and passionate audiences want their own community and brand. The brands we are focused on: our Web sites such as eHOW, Livestrong and our other properties. This is where we focus our branding energy. Rosen : As you know, journalism is in a good deal of peril today because of a collapsing economic model. I've read that Demand does not want to go anywhere near news, which is interesting, but do you feel you have discovered anything that would be useful to journalists as they try to survive Rosenblatt : We respect journalists very much. We think they need to use technology to help them figure out what audiences want and how to get value from their content more effectively. And there are big opportunities for them to increase quality by removing inefficiencies in the process of content creation. We would love to partner with as many publishers and media outlets as we can Rosen : You seem to know how to make money on the Web, why not get into news? Rosenblatt : Because we haven't figure out how to do it responsibly and profitably also, its completely saturated and highly competitive. Consumers already have more sources than they need. Rosen : Someone who follows my work and knew I was interviewing you told me to ask you this: Do you love the Web? The implied question there is: if you love the Web, then why are you doing this, running these content farms... ? Rosenblatt : OMG. My entire career and life has been about the Web. Trying to innovate and create value where open spaces exist. We do not have a content mill as we discussed but an efficient method to get people the information they need when they want it. That is improving the Internet and I am proud of it Rosen : Open spaces? What does that phrase mean? Rosenblatt : Where there is a lot of room for opportunity for not only our company but for other entrepreneurs. Rosen : I know you have a meeting to run to... thanks very much... anything you wish to add? Rosenblatt : I hope to see you in NY in the future to continue our dialogue. All my best and happy holidays. Check out ReadWriteWeb's entire coverage of Demand Media and content farms: Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried How Google Can Combat Content Farms Demand Media Is a Page View Generating Machine - And it's Working Answers.com: 31 Million Copied and Pasted Web Pages Can't Go Wrong The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media How Demand Media Produces 4,000 Pieces of Content a Day Ad-Driven Content - Is it Crossing The Line? Discuss

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Jay Rosen Interviews Demand Media: Are Content Farms "Demonic"?

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Facebook's Privacy Move Violates Contract With Users

I've been writing a lot about so-called 'content farms' in recent months - companies like Demand Media and Answers.com which create thousands of pieces of content per day and are making a big impact on the Web. Both of those two companies are now firmly inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S. , on a par with the likes of Apple and AOL. Big media, blogs and Google are all beginning to take notice. Sponsor Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, recently published an article on how journalism can survive in the Internet age. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington also riffs on this theme , mentioning AOL's "Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media" and quoting a Wired piece on Demand Media from October. I started my analysis of Demand Media in this August post . I wrote then that Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software and make lots of money through ads. Demand Media has been heavily funded to carry out that mission, to the tune of $355 million. In short, it's a well-funded, well-oiled page view generating machine. In November I explored more about how Demand Media produces 4,000 pieces of content a day , based on an interview I did with the founders in September. I followed up by asking: is ad-driven content crossing a line? Low Quality, High Impact The bottom line is that the quality of content produced by these 'content farms' is dubious, which has an impact on both publishers and readers. Last week I analyzed the way wikiHow produces its content - its users do all of the writing and editing for free, via a Wikipedia-like platform. There was evidence that wikiHow's model is producing better content than its Demand Media counterpart for how-to articles, eHow. More worrying though is that Demand Media is producing thousands of these types of articles a day. So is the Web becoming awash with low-quality content produced by content farms like Demand Media, Answers.com and now AOL? Yes it is. From my analysis of Demand Media and similar sites, such content is very generic and lacks depth. While I wouldn't go as far as wikiHow founder Jack Herrick and say that it "lacks soul," it certainly lacks passion and often also lacks knowledge of the topic at hand. Arrington's analogy with fast food is apt - it is content produced quickly and made to order. Can Quality Survive? Given the impact that content farms are having right now, how can producers of 'quality' content survive? Chris Ahearn from Thomson Reuters claims that journalism will "do more than survive the Internet Age, it will thrive." Ahearn notes that Reuters makes the "vast majority of its revenues" from subscription-based business models targeted to "vertical and niche markets." Plus Reuters, he says, provides "valuable services - not just content." Ahearn also implies that syndication technologies, like Reuters' semantic analysis platform Open Calais , will lead to a new kind of "B2B content network" - where content creators and publishers can easily collaborate and make money together. Google Needs to Wake Up and Smell the Coffee In my view both writers and readers of content will need to work harder to get quality content. I know I'd rather read an article by The Economist on any given topic, than one generated by Demand Media. But we, as readers, need more help from Google and the other search engines. Right now 'quantity' still rules on the Web, 'quality' is hard to find. Perhaps that's why Reuters is betting on the subscription model - it hopes that consumers will just subscribe to quality content, thereby removing the need to search for it. I think there's something to that, which if true implies that Google will become less relevant in the future. Should Google be worried about that? Yes; and they are . I can only hope that Google and other search engines find betters ways to surface quality content, for its own sake as well as ours. Because right now Google is being infiltrated on a vast scale by content farms. If you thought it was bad enough that many professional blogs pump out 30 posts a day, often regurgitations of press releases or quick write-ups of "news" such as Twitter being down for a few minutes (note the irony of that tweet), this new type of Google gaming is on a far bigger scale. What Demand Media, Answers.com and AOL are doing is having a much greater impact on the quality and findability of content on the Web. See also: Demand Media Is a Page View Generating Machine - And it's Working Answers.com: 31 Million Copied and Pasted Web Pages Can't Go Wrong The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media How Demand Media Produces 4,000 Pieces of Content a Day Ad-Driven Content - Is it Crossing The Line? Photo credit: ~Darin~ Discuss

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Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried

The real-time web was hot this year and it's likely to become a standard expectation on sites all around the world next year. We've tracked this trend extensively with a face-to-face summit of industry leaders and an 84-page research report on The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Who were the big movers and shakers in real time this year? Check out our list of the top 10 below and let us know if there are any important ones we missed. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009: Pubsubhubbub Pubsubhubbub , created as a 20% project by Googlers Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick, is described as "a simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS." It delivers updated content in real-time from a pinged hub server out to all subscribers that have requested updates. Real-time PubSubHubbub feeds are already being published by FeedBurner, Blogger, LiveJournal, LiveDoor, Google Alerts, Feedoor and the feed republishing service Superfeedr. Facebook's FriendFeed, LazyFeed and the newest version of Netvibes are consuming Hubbub feeds so far, as are a number of small sites and services that are using the feeds for machine-to-machine communication. Hubbub consuming applications are reporting server traffic savings of up to 85% and engineers love it . RSSCloud RSSCloud is a technology that's been a part of the RSS 2.0 spec for years but got a new burst of development energy this year when creator Dave Winer began working on it in part as a way to create a decentralized Twitter experience. RSSCloud is similar to Hubbub, is often implemented in conjunction with it but doesn't deliver full content updates with the notification of changes to a feed. The first major move to adopt RSSCloud was by blog publisher WordPress . The latest addition to the technology is a new feature called CloudPipe , which will enable delivery of real-time feeds to desktop and mobile clients, even behind a firewall. Creator Dave Winer has been a key figure in an incredible number of the most important technologies of the read/write era of the web. He created the first popular blogging software (Radio Userland), was the first to enable podcast delivery in an RSS feed visa-vi the now standard method of enclosures, he built the web's leading blog ping server (weblogs.com), he ushered RSS into the mainstream, he created the format for sharing bundles of RSS feeds and other outlines (OPML), he wrote the XML-RPC framework (predecessor of SOAP) and the MetaWeblog API for remote blog management. Now Dave Winer is working on real-time web technology and we'd be fools to not watch what he's doing. Facebook Facebook, for all its shortcomings, has turned more than 200 million new people on to real-time streams of content pushed to their browsers in 2009. If you think this paradigm is important, Facebook deserves a medal. Google Real-Time Search Honorable Mentions Echo - real-time comment aggregation Evri - real-time semantic news tracker Lazyfeed - topical discovery engine Netvibes - now probably the most popular real-time consuming feed reader in the world Just this week the Big G showed of its new real-time search feature . It kills what Bing and Yahoo are doing. It's simple but elegant and effective. For certain search queries, real time web pages, Twitter updates, Facebook content, MySpace updates and more will appear in a subtle, streaming box in your results page, with a pause button. It's not live on the public site yet, it's just a demo, but it's going to be very, very big next year. Big enough that it belongs on the list this year just for being demoed. Twitter search Whether you're watching brand mentions for your work or participating in a semi-obscene public ritual of riffs on a trending meme - millions of people now regularly watch the real-time updates on Twitter search results pages. Twitter bought a search engine called Summize in July of 2008, built by a group of former AOL scientists and originally intended to be a sentiment analysis technology. It has become incredibly important this year. When the site's new GeoLocation API gets put to more substantive use, that search engine is going to become all the more important - in ways that could change our day-to-day lives. Next page: Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009 6-10 Superfeedr Julien Genestoux's Superfeedr is a service that pulls in content feeds from around the Web and then offers updates for those feeds in XMPP or PubSubHubbub format. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web and in fact just added publisher analytics ala FeedBurner today . Superfeedr is a key enabler for other applications and if you want an interesting view into the nitty gritty of the real-time web, you should go subscribe to the Superfeedr company blog right now. Genestoux says the companies using his service so far include SixApart, Adobe, Twitterfeed, StatusNet and a number of small services such as Webwag, EventVue, Quub, AppNotifications, Excla.im and SmackSale. That's an impressive list and your company could well be on it by next year. Tornado This September, Facebook open-sourced the newly acquired FriendFeed's real-time infrastructure. It's a fast, relatively easy way to add real-time flow to your application and developers around the world are excited about it. We're all about the potential here at ReadWriteWeb and we think Tornado has a lot of it. We hope to see big things from this project next year. Breaking News Online's iPhone App Breaking News Online is an international news organization founded by now 19 year old Netherlands native Michael van Poppel. Van Poppel somehow sold a video of Ossama Bin Laden to Reuters two years ago and has since built up the fastest, smallest news organization on the planet. The American Red Cross watches BNO closely for notices of new natural disasters. MSNBC paid what have been a hefty sum for control over the Breaking News Online Twitter account this month, but the organization's iPhone app lives on in the hands of the original organization. It's a simple app but one that will keep you on top of world events around the clock like nothing else. It's a great use of the iPhone's new Push feature, implemented this year. Aardvark Aardvark is a social search engine that combines artificial intelligence, natural-language processing and presence data to create what the company calls "the real-time Web of people." It's got some heavy engineering behind it and this author uses it almost every day. Google is reportedly in the process of trying to buy it. Cliqset We love a good technical standard and stream reader startup Cliqset is blazing new trails with its new real-time ActivityStreams feed normalization API . The API means activities from 70 different social services can be read in a common language and 3rd party services can slice and dice them to create new user experiences. Several high-profile applications have already begun consuming activity feeds republished through Cliqset and the company says many more consumers are in the works. This is the stuff that distributed, interoperable platforms are built on, where small innovators have access to economies of scale. Those are our picks! Check them out, let us know who we missed and get ready for a coming time when most of the web will be running in real time! Discuss

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Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009

Google launched its version of integrated real-time search , one of a number of impressive product demos given, at a press event this morning. It's much better than what Bing and Yahoo! have done , but it's still just the beginning of a full-scale engagement with the real-time web. To provide further context to this discussion, we're rerunning a post we wrote in seven months ago, titled " 3 Models of Value in the Real-Time Web. " We hope you find it useful and interesting. Sponsor Hey web DJ. Reach into your magic bag of search tools and pull out a big result - dripping with related ephemera born just moments ago. Those could hold the grain of information you're really looking for, or they could sparkle with data that changes your course of action in unexpected ways. Alert! Another factor has emerged, elsewhere on another site. You said you wanted to be told, right away , about any online artifacts that crossed a threshold of popularity within a certain group of people in your field. That has just occurred, so it's time to watch the replay of how it got so hot, evaluate its usefulness and decide whether to bring this emergent phenomenon into the work you were doing before you were interrupted, drop the former for the latter or return to your original focus. How would you like this to be your job description? It could well be - if the red hot Real Time Web keeps showing up on sites all around the internet. The Real Time Web is coming so fast we've hardly had any time to think about it yet. So let's do that, shall we? The two hottest technologies online, Twitter and Facebook, are fast integrating real-time delivery of activity streams to their users. Paul Buchheit, the man who built the first versions of both Gmail and Adsense, says the real time web is going to be the next big thing . Buchheit's FriendFeed is a key point of innovation in real time. Social media ping server Gnip promised to turn everything online into Instant Messaging-style XMPP feeds, and though that's been put on hold in favor of more immediately clear value - we've still got our fingers crossed. Our investigation of companies like Bit.ly and OneRiot this morning turned up even more big news that's right around the corner for the Real Time Web. But what's the point? What's in it for us, as users? We offer below three models of value that we suspect will be found in the Real Time Web. They are the concepts that underly the vision described above at the top of this post. Those concepts are Ambiance, Automation and Emergence . This is just an initial exploration of ideas, reality will undoubtedly be more complicated shortly. We welcome your participation in thinking about this part of the fast-approaching future of the web. Ambiance The web is made up of web pages linked together, but hovering around many of those pages are now social media signals like blog posts, bookmarks, tweets and other URLs that refer to a page but aren't visible when you're looking at it. The same is true for concepts. Most of us use Google to find pages about things we're looking for, but Google prioritizes historical inbound links and the text on pages. In the above image you can see a custom search engine we use here at ReadWriteWeb, with Mark Carey's Twitter on Google greasemonkey script running on top of it. If you want to know about streaming video, Forrester's, Jeremiah Owyang, has a running list of vendors in the space (1) and that's where you want to start - but wouldn't you like to know about the very freshest (2) live streaming vendors on the market as well? That's what people are talking about, in real time, on Twitter. In our experience these Twitter augmented search results are valuable because they are up to the minute - but sometimes they are also just better . Someday you'll be able to discover Owyang's list and be prompted to view the most recent, the most authoritative and the most "socially relevant to you" conversations about the same concept going on all around the web. People are working on all of that and as research-lovers we hope they succeed. The point is that no matter what you're doing on the web, there are valuable related activities going on elsewhere - probably simultaneously. Exposing those is exciting. Automation We probably should have started out with this, but what's the most obviously valuable example of clear value in real-time information delivery in recent internet history? Blackberry and the push email! We tend to assume that the real time web is something we'll be looking at constantly, because it's constantly bringing up new information. That doesn't have to be the case, though. The real time web could very well just do its thing and notify us, in real time, of important events. Thresholds crossed. Simple changes made. For example, when the already controversial Google Chrome Terms of Service were changed again last December, I got an SMS sent to my phone notifying me that it had been changed. I was able to jump online, grab a screenshot of the changes from the application that was monitoring the document and report on the change before anyone else . I certainly wasn't watching for the change. A robot was doing that for me and let me know about the change in near real time. It was pretty awesome, but it wasn't real time and the services I patched together to do it are all marginal enough that they often don't work or are very late. Put real time at the center of the web and we'll be able to automate all kinds of information monitoring. At first it will be a competitive advantage for those who use it strategically; then it will just change the game, become standard practice and require competitive knowledge workers to come up with something else that's new. Read the last section of this post and the comments readers left here: 3 Models of Value in the Real-Time Web Discuss

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What the Real-Time Web Can Deliver

Tibco is coming out with a Twitter like service that has an emphasis on subject matters more than following people. In Tibco's view, the enterprise is not about the people anymore but the subject and contextual information that relates to a person's job. The value is in decoupling the subject matter from the person so the right information can be found quickly and easily. Sponsor The service is called tibbr, which Tibco describes as a workplace communications tool. Tibco has a corporate focus on real-time technologies. In June, the company announced Tibco Silver, a cloud-based platform for developing applications in the enterprise. tibbr is built on the Silver platform. tibbr is a real-time technology that is definitely different than a service like Salesforce Chatter , which aggregates commentary on different matters to give context and knowledge about a particular topic. Instead, tibbr will offer a service that is more about finding information about the most granular of topics. We find this approach a bit cold, perhaps even taking a bit of the soul out of what real-time social technologies have historically provided. But this may be precisely the point. Corporations may be places filled with people but it is the work and the efficiency that drive performance. Companies are flooded with information, most of it junk. The demand is not for more talk but for ways to be notified of information when it becomes available. We are reminded of Attensa , which provides a service that finds connections and aggregates data on different topics. Individuals are notified when a reference to the data is discovered. tibbr is agnostic about the actual user. The subject may represent an individual, an application or a business process. This seems like search or discovery in many regards, driven by a subscription mechanism like a feed. The focus on subject matter in tibbr makes conversation almost secondary by eliminating what it calls "static and unwanted information clutter." The intention is to eliminate duplicate information and "reply all," email strings. tibbr is definitely an intriguing service that represents how real-time technologies are taking different forms in the settings of the enterprise. tibbr will be available in the first quarter of 2010. Discuss

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Tibco: A Twitter Like Service That's About Subjects More Than People

Augmented reality browser Layar recently launched it's v3 publishing site chock full of developer tools. The launch signifies more than 1000 active developers being given the chance to showcase their 3rd party applications. By exposing this immersive platform to outsiders, the company is solidifying its title as a pioneer in the "future of augmented reality". In a recent blog post Layar outlined 5 cases to demonstrate the power of the platform. In addition to some of the company's earlier 3rd party releases, below are some of our favorite layars. Sponsor 1. Civic Projects and Politics: A Netherlands-based Provast created a layar where users can see the final plans for the currently unfinished construction of the Markthal Rotterdam. Meanwhile developer Andree Toonk worked with NetKnowledge.ca on a slightly more political project. His layar gives information on all of the projects that receive funding from the Canadian government as part of Canada's Economic Action Plan. 2. History and Landmarks: Those visiting Liverpool and London can walk down music's memory lane with a visual tour of Beatles-related points of interest. Layar developer Augmentedreality.co.uk created a layar where users can follow the exploits of the Fab Four. Meanwhile a number of developers have looked to historical landmarks as inspirations for their work. Similar to Junaio's editable AR app , BuildAR lets you create your own points of interest and customize your layars to suit your needs. 3. Social: Dutch Squio.nl engineer Johannes la Poutré has a number of social applications for Layar. Similar to TwittARound , Tweeps Around queries Twitter for posts and marks the exact location that the post is given on an augmented reality layar. In his Foursquare application Poutré gives users access to the latest Foursquare venues and tips. 4. Advertising and Inventory : In addition to obvious product finding and advertising-based layars, Masternaut created a layar that allows users to track vehicles and assets across cities. Meanwhile developer Bastian Voight created a real time ship tracker for Vesseltracker with a layar that displays the position of moored ships in the world's largest ports. 5. Specialized Reference : Developer Pablo Garcia created the Elipse Golf layar where users can find the exact location of a golf hole and tee up for success. Smallroomstudios.net developer Patrick O'Reilly focused on transportation with both a Dublin bus location layar and a layar for Dublin's public bicycle program. Other layars also exist to locate hospitals, apartments for rent and wireless hotspots. Discuss

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Layar Adds Foursquare, Beatlemania and Civic Projects to its AR Offerings